The latest updates to ARC don’t seem to have improved it much. I’m using ARC off a mac mini at home, on an iPhone 15, in a VW ID.4 with carplay.
sometimes when it connects with the car and starts playing, the carplay interface does not show the now playing sideways striped triangle thing in the top right corner, so there’s no way to show the now playing screen. Going to the separate Now Playing app does not bring up ARC, like it used to. When ARC goes to the next track the triangle thing shows up, so it seems like it’s not registering what’s currently playing mid-track when it reconnects to the car.
Not a new problem, but why o why does ARC not show the Now Playing screen when it reconnects in the car and starts playing? Why am i forced to hit that little triangle to show what’s playing every damn time i get in the car?
Can’t say that connections are any more reliable than before. When i get “poor connection” warnings, it still means that i usually have to force quit the app on the phone to get things going again. ARC rarely is able to recover from this situation. Sometimes i’m able to get it working by skipping to the next song. When “poor connection” happens i am never able to get it to restart the same song.
And not a bug, but a request to add an alphabet picker in the Song/Album/Artist selection windows on carplay. They’re all basically useless since it would take way too long to manually scroll to anything but the letter A as they currently work.
And of course, I do use it daily and love that it exists!
Bullet 1- for sure, this is annoying, and I believe it has to do with iOS’s power saving mode which causes ARC to go into deep sleep or quit the longer it’s not used.
Bullet 2 - this is all dependent upon your car manufacture’s method of employing CarPlay. What you are describing is quite common with cars that have an outer operating system like android that is driving the CarPlay integration. Not much Roon can do about that.
I have never had any consistency with ARC and the ‘now playing’ feature in my car with Apple Carplay. Sometimes it works fine as expected, but most of the time it never resumes properly.
I also get the Poor Connection, and have to force close the app to resume.
I just set up Tailscale and had a successful trip today so I will see if this resolves the poor connection issues.
I also agree that we need an alphabet picker. I usually have to resort to finding an album on my phone and starting it that way.
I’m trying to make Arc my daily driver but it’s been a pain so far. Maybe Tailscale will fix it, we will see.
It’s not fit for purpose in my opinion - it just didn’t work consistently and never really has in my experience. I deleted the app from my phone the other day to avoid further frustration. I’m now using Qobuz, Bandcamp and Apple Music in the car.
Well it’s just locked out all my downloads so they only work when it’s online. Kind of defeats the whole point of them. I get spotty connections on my commute which ARC has never dealt with properly so I turned to downloads to help. No they are useless for a lot of the time. Back to PlexAmp I feel never has an issue with it and it’s far better with spotty cellular reception as it caches further ahead when it can.
ARC depends very much on the quality of WiFi/cellular signals. To get non-interrupt and consistent music listening using ARC, I also download songs for listening. In this case, ARC works excellently anytime anywhere in the world. Of course, it limits only to the downloaded songs and also occupies the memory of my iPhone/iPad.
With nearly one year of daily Roon usage, other than the ARC is not perfect, I feel that the “search” function needs more work. Also, annoying things like after the song removal, it is labeled “unavailable” in the playlist and I often need to manually go through the playlist and delete them. If I don’t, ARC may get stuck during update. Songs after removal should be automatically deleted in the associated playlist by Roon.
Over the last few months, I’ve driven about 3,000 km across Germany! My music source was ARC on my iPhone 16 Pro, and my network was Vodafone 5G. My iPhone has about 6 GB of Roon downloads stored. During the entire trip, ARC never left me alone, neither online nor downloading! Kudos to ROON, great work.
Hmm, I don’t want to proclaim victory too soon, but maybe it’s largely fixed for me. Your post reminded me to try again:
I turned on the offline mode and at first was appalled by nearly all covers disappearing, much more than usual.
Turned offline mode off again and the covers were still gone!
Scrolled through the whole list, which seems to have triggered a re-caching.
Turned offline mode back on and all covers seem to be there. However, most are low-res in the album page and small on Now Playing. However, some are fine - no idea what the difference is.
Looks like progress at least. Let’s see if it stays that way.
Edit: Next try two hours later, and the covers are not only still there but those low-res ones I had seen earlier are hi-res now, at least in Now Playing. Though others that I checked now for the first time are still low-res, but it seems I can hope that they will fix themselves as time goes on.
If it continues like this, I’ll consider it largely fixed for me. I hope you have the same experience.
Though it’s possible that there is an issue remaining in so far as many covers show in low-res in the album view when offline, but when I start playing them (while still offline) they are hi-res on Now Playing, so the hi-res version seems to be available and should be used in the album view.
Edit after 13 hours: Still working, except the low-res issue. Not sure about the details of this because some are still low-res in album view but show high in Now Playing, while others stay low in Now Playing, but do switch to high if I load them while online (and then stay high after going offline).
@Jenil_Patel, No, I use Roon Arc with CarPlay in the car. I have Tailscale downloaded to my iPhone and Mac Mini (Roon server). It’s not perfect but it does work quite consistently. I use Roon Arc in the car all the time.
To my earlier “reported” issue here… This have been happening time to time to me still.
However I did notice by accident something.
When I start Android car play sometimes it does pick audio source as bluetooth, even I am connected with USB cable. When I switched audio source to bluetooth audio did work.
So issue is not actually roonarc not playing music, instead it does direct it to “wrong output” (or input depending how you look it).
Why this do not happen with other players I do not really know… maybe you can control what is preferred output on Android app code.
How my car behaves that it changed input to USB / Cable when I connect it. Then obviously if it picks bluetooth as output on Roon I do not hear anything.
Just liked to report this. Maybe devs can do small modification of preferred output or so.
